Entries from July 7, 2013 - July 13, 2013

July 13, 2013

by Walter Chaw It
opens with a grab-bag of heavily-armed genre clichés--the world-weary
man of action (Adrien Brody), the tough-talking Latina (Alice Braga),
the mad-dog orange jump-suited killer (Walton Goggins), the Yakuza
enforcer (Louis Ozawa Changchien), the Soviet (Oleg Taktarov), the
savage (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali), the nebbish (Topher Grace), and the
wrong Mexican (Danny Trejo)--free-falling through a jungle canopy into
bush that doesn't make Cambodia look like Kansas so much as it makes Predators look like Avatar.
They're the game, see--the most dangerous game! And they've been
dropped on an alien wildlife preserve for the express purpose of being
hunted by a trio of the titular Predators. As if that weren't enough,
the film's weak-ass script takes pains to establish that our "heroes"
are also, vocationally, "predators." Get it? It's what passes for
clever in a film that takes too long to get where we want it to go,
diverting itself with one of those dumb nick-of-time animal-shooting
sequences that didn't thrill in Dances with Wolves and doesn't
thrill here (so they do it twice, why not), as well as an extended
monologue delivered by a fish-eyed, paunchy Laurence Fishburne that,
for all its kitsch pleasure, grinds the movie to a standstill. If it's
not going to be smart, it could at least have the decency to not also
be boring.

*½/****starring Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger, Jon Foster, Elle Fanningscreenplay by Tod Williams, based on the novel A Widow for One Year by John Irvingdirected by Tod Williams

by Walter Chaw Jeff Bridges is so easy that it's criminal. He
does things actors shouldn't be able to do, and he does them without
breaking a sweat. He's one of our national treasures, because he never
draws any attention to himself in the manner of, say, a Sean Penn or a
Tom Hanks. It's not showy, what he does--it's acting. And lest you
think that it isn't, compare his cocky swagger in Bad Company to his awkward shuffle in Starman to his stung braggadocio in The Fisher King to his archetypal slob in The Big Lebowski to his shell-shocked suburbanite in Fearless.
Take each performance by itself and it's comfortable to think that
Bridges is just being Bridges; consider them as a whole and it dawns
that the man's a genius. Any movie with Bridges in it therefore has
something in it to recommend--no less so than his latest, Tod Williams's The Door in the Floor, an adaptation of the first third of John Irving's novel A Widow for One Year.

July 12, 2013

July
13, 2003|Castle
Marne B&B, a literal house-sized castle, broods at the end of a
tree-lined street in a marginal Denver neighbourhood, just a
hop-skip-jump away from what used to be the red-light district.
Out-of-place to say the least, the edifice rises in large grey blocks
like a medieval vision, albeit one equipped with cozies, throws,
knick-knacks, and Jacuzzis in every room. The funny thing about it is
that of all the weird places to meet Heather Donahue, Castle Marne
doesn't seem the weirdest: like the actress, it's theatrical,
expansive, and, for the most part, out of sight. More's the pity for
Ms. Donahue, as since her career-making role in The Blair
Witch Project, she's been subjected to the same virulent
backlash as the film, making her persona non grata
in Hollywood even though her minimal work since then has been far and
away the best part of marginal films--and indicative, besides, of
genuine talent.
What
Ms. Donahue still has trouble with, and it's hard to blame her for not
having critical distance on something so ambiguous in her life, is the
importance of The Blair Witch Project in shaping
modern film trends and the rarity of a picture that buggers sexual
objectification. Although I've seen her in a few non-Blair
Witch roles, just how attractive Ms. Donahue is remains
something of a shock. It isn't that she's unattractive in her most
famous role, it's that her attractiveness never enters into the
equation--there's a thesis paper in there all by itself. In town to
conduct a Q&A after a screening of Seven and a Match
(released as part of Madstone's "Film
Forward" series), on a beautiful early-summer morning a
little less than four years after The Blair Witch Project opened
in Denver, the animated Ms. Donahue sat down with me on the patio of
Castle Marne.

by Walter
Chaw The line between love and misanthropy is thin and Todd Solondz is
a cunning cartographer of that precarious divide. He sees political
correctness as an insidious product of the kind of paternalistic racism
that discards truth in favour of generally held truisms, a crutch for
well-meaning racists who lack the wit to grasp that the basic
misunderstanding of difference driving a desire to discriminate against
minorities is identical to that which drives a desire to protect
minorities. Solondz's films are confrontational in the extreme, full
frontal assaults on the hypocrisy that fuels most relationships and
stark dissections of the politics of cruelty.

by Walter Chaw Lebanese-born Ziad Doueiri, an assistant
cameraman on Quentin Tarantino's first three features, demonstrates as a director the kind of elliptical reserve more commonly
associated with Terrence Malick. Indeed, the most powerful stretches of his
sophomore effort, The Attack, recall the fragments of The Thin Red Line
that elucidate Pvt. Bell's wife's betrayal through a series of voiceovers,
remembered conversations, and gauzy/idealized images of a bucolic existence
that may or may not have ever existed. An adaptation of a novel by Yasmina
Khadra, The Attack details the discovery by an Arab emergency-room
surgeon based in Israel, Amin (Ali Suliman), that his wife Siham (Reymond
Amsalem, who has the quality and pitch of Illeana Douglas--a wonderful thing)
is the suicide bomber responsible for an attack in Tel Aviv, the casualties of
which we watch Amin try to save. Amin has been "accepted" by the
Jews, we understand, though there's tension throughout the early scenes as his
friends and colleagues awkwardly navigate around him in a way that reads
initially as condescending, then increasingly hostile as events unfold. Hannah
Arendt would have something to say about this; so would Paula Deen and her
legion of insensate followers. When Amin receives an award for his work, his
acceptance speech includes the platitude that all Arabs have a little Jew in
them and vice versa; by the picture's last words, "Every time you go away, a
little piece of me dies," one wonders if he means the little
piece that has empathy for the opposition's point of view.

July 10, 2013

by Walter Chaw
There's something desperately wrong with veteran television director
Leslie H. Martinson's spy spoof Fathom, and it took
me the whole movie to figure it out: Raquel Welch, as the titular
va-va-va-voom dental hygienist cum parachutist cum superspy spends the
entire film running from symbols of aggressive virility. Clad
fetchingly in a variety of swimsuits and tight shirts (but never
pants), our Fathom is pursued by a man with a speargun, by a Russian
paramour mistaking our heroine for a prostitute, through various
tunnels, and through a train. In its barest form, Fathom
appears to be a rape fantasy involving a helpless, screaming,
occasionally castrating Welch (though, tellingly, the only person she
kills is another woman), who plays a variation on her standard
cocktease and--naturally--deserves getting prodded about by a bull
while a collection of bad guys poke at her with phallic shunts.

by Walter Chaw I've never been able to contextualize Richard
Attenborough's Magic in any meaningful way. I think
the best William Goldman pulp novels (Control, The
Princess Bride, Marathon Man, Tinsel)
defy categorization and emerge as artifacts out of time and genre. The
homosexual twists, the sexualized fairytales, the exploding breast
implants, the first-person narration taken from "Fats's Diary" of Magic,
his thriller about a mad artist engaged in that hard-to-contextualize
discipline of ventriloquism...

by Walter Chaw I have this theory that the reason the
United States started remaking Japanese movies (particularly the J-Horror
stuff) almost immediately post-9/11 is that it was after that pivotal event that the
country assumed a distinctly Japanese worldview. Suddenly, it was possible for
something unthinkable to happen to civilians; the universe was callous and
arbitrary in its measuring out of lives, and the idea of a "civilian target"
or, more to the point, of "innocence," was hopelessly quaint. It's as
good an explanation as any as to why there are so many evil children in
Japanese horror--the same explanation, as it happens, for why there were so
many evil children in late-'60s/early-'70s American horror--the
difference being that there was usually an explanation for why the children
were bad in the United States (the Devil, mostly). In Japan? Not so much. In America's post-9/11 evil-kid flicks, even the ones not remaking
Japanese films, the kids are generally just born that way. Even the rise of "torture
porn" is more or less a not-as-graphic reproduction of Japan's "Guinea
Pig" cinema--seven pictures from the '80s (including the indescribable Mermaid
in a Manhole and Flower of Flesh & Blood, which caused a
credulous Charlie Sheen to call the FBI), culminating now in the United States
with a pretty rough update of Maniac starring everybody's favourite
probably-murderer, Elijah Wood.

July 9, 2013

Humpday director Lynn Shelton
wants her men get to know each other better

July
10, 2009|It's
mere coincidence, filmmaker Lynn Shelton will tell you, that her last
two movies plumb the phenomenon of men reaching a make-or-break point
in their friendships. Coincidence also, one assumes, that both films
feature these bosom bros sprawled out across the same bed after the
climax. The soft-spoken exploration Shelton began in My
Effortless Brilliance (2008) finds a comedic payoff in Humpday,
her third feature, which won a special jury prize at Sundance. In June,
the film came to the Seattle International Film Festival for its first
screening in Shelton's native city and base of operations--where it
proceeded to win none of SIFF's upper-echelon awards, netting low
runner-up status in the categories of best film and best actor (for
Mark Duplass) and a second-place showing for Shelton as best director
(with first-place going to The Hurt Locker's
Kathryn Bigelow). Symptoms of a hometown backlash?
Still,
her flick had already outpaced many of its SIFF fellows in the race for
distribution and strong word-of-mouth.

July
10, 2005|Dressed
in a New York uniform of black-on-black and in town for a cup of coffee
to discuss his feature debut, the Big Apple roundelay Heights,
Chris Terrio is slight and slightly nervous. Modeled loosely after
Shakespeare's "Macbeth", the film is defiantly literary in its approach
to metaphors and doppelgängers--something that makes sense when one
considers Mr. Terrio's background as a Harvard and Cambridge-bred
English scholar who turned his attentions away from academia's
air-conditioned Ivory Tower to toil in the boiler room of cinema and
its attendant indignities of PR tours and ink-stained wretches.
When
I met Mr. Terrio, I was so exhausted I had prepared mainly by watching
his film a second time an hour before getting in the car and hunting
down a stray, orphan quote attributed to a "Chris Terrio" commenting on
Cambridge by way of Harvard. I wasn't at all certain that they were one
and the same person, but deadlines and borderline depression being what
they are, I was ready to make an ass of myself. The happy discovery, of
course, is that Mr. Terrio is delightful: self-effacing, smart, and
still-vital in the way of a young filmmaker not yet soured on his
profession and his peers--who hasn't learned that it's become all but
verboten in the modern mediascape to admit to loving Lars von Trier and
hating the low bestial tingle-moments that lace crap like Cinderella
Man, and to have something passionate to say about culture,
such as it is fresh into the twenty-first century.

by Walter Chaw We
are each of us an anthology of disparate tales, rumors, poems, and
melodramatic novellas. Clive Barker once wryly observed that we are
books of blood, "wherever we're opened, we're red," and for as
intentionally grotesque as that sounds, Barker has a metaphysical
point. It is the same point that Jon Shear's directorial debut Urbania
makes again and again (and, unfortunately, again): that the stories we
tell others become our reality through their manipulated perceptions.
If we are what others see us as, then what we cause others to see us as
becomes what we are--each of us is very literally an author of our own
identity through the abuse of others' faith in our stories. There are
two areas that this kind of reality crafting/testing holds a specific
currency: sexual identity, and urban legend--"don't ask, don't tell,"
and "this really happened to a friend of mine," invocations to a
post-modernist muse and a deconstructed vocal tradition.

Hafið*/****starring Gunnar Eyjólfsson, Hilmir Snær Guðnason, Hélène de Fougerolles, Kristbjörg Kjeldscreenplay by Baltasar Kormákur, based on the play by Olafur Haukur Símonarsondirected by Baltasar Kormákur

by Walter Chaw A family melodrama that's a little like Chekhov but a lot more like Telemundo, Baltasar Kormákur's The Sea (Hafið)
takes the bare bones of "King Lear" and fashions from them the sort of
bleeding hair-render that runs roughshod through the Altman/Bergman
canon without the benefit of genius. Its use of foreground, of mannered
close-ups and overlapping dialogue, of old men journaling their lives
at the end of their lives, all feel at odds with the film's weightless,
familiar tale of an old man shackled to the ideal of a better era in
opposition with subsequent generations of useless, snivelling bastard
children trying to feed off the corpse of said better era, the irony of
that Icelandic tradition including a sort of culturally
institutionalized rape (the contention of which I find to be not merely
shockingly reductive, but deeply suspect besides) mentioned but left
unexamined for the most part. The problems of The Sea aren't
restricted to this reliance on reckless ascriptions of cultural
archetype for irony or poignancy (an Ayn Rand-ian predilection for
staging hypothetical, unwinnable arguments in their extreme), extending
to issues as problematic as a script (adapted from a Olafur Haukur
Símonarson play by Kormákur, a sometime-actor who appeared as the mad
scientist in Hal Hartley's No Such Thing) that is as repetitive in regards to dialogue as to scenario.

July
10, 2011|I
was grateful for the opportunity to moderate a Q&A with
director
Seth Gordon at a Boston-area screening of his latest film, Horrible
Bosses,
which has proven to be something of an oasis in an otherwise lousy
summer for movies. Gordon's eclectic career made him a fascinating
character to research: after studying architecture at Yale, he found
himself at a teaching job in Kenya that ignited an interest in
filmmaking. Our
Q&A was a fairly animated twenty minutes; asked to lob trivia
questions at the audience for a poster giveaway, his first was, "What
was the name of Michael Knight's car?" In our one-on-one discussion at
the Ritz-Carlton the following morning, he dialled it down a little,
exuding an "aw shucks" modesty that seemed to reveal a greater desire
to listen than to talk. He tells me outright that he owes the
relatively smooth production of Horrible Bosses to
the success of The Hangover
(another Warner Bros. release), though as our discussion took a
thematic turn, I sensed some reluctance to commiserate with my
assertions about how his latest trumps the "other comedies" of its ilk.

by Walter Chaw While biographer Todd McCarthy refers to
the two
versions of Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep as
marking
the delineation point separating linear (early) Hawks from non-linear
(later) Hawks, I feel like you can mark the director's affection for
bonzo non-sequiturs throughout his sultry To Have and Have
Not.
The picture tells its tale of immigrants marooned off the islets of war
and sexual sophistication--an island bell jar and pressure-cooker
envisioned as a sequel of sorts to Casablanca.
But
where Casablanca's sex was mature and
companionate
(the sizzle replaced by simmer) and tinged with regret, To
Have and Have Not has a slick of bestial sweat to it that
promises that the explosion of really naughty stuff is looming rather
than in the rear-view. (There's no sexier film in all the Forties.) The
story of the corrupt Vichy government and the brave French underground
unfolding behind the red-hot flirtation between diplomatically
non-affiliated fishing boat captain Harry "Steve" Morgan (Humphrey
Bogart) and lost American teen "Slim" (Lauren Bacall) is punctuated
helter-skelter by husky lounge numbers courtesy Slim and Cricket (Hoagy
Carmichael) and riff sessions with Steve and Slim that have the cadence
and unpredictability of jazz improvisation. It's not so much a
narrative as a medley in a bouncy key, and Hawks is not so much a
director as a bandleader. Much has been made of Hawks's skill in casting
(and it's hard to argue otherwise when he sniffs out the alchemical
enchantment between old man Bogie and new thing Bacall (and Marilyn
Monroe and Jane Russell; and Dean Martin and a bottle)), but looking at
To Have and Have Not--the first of
Bogie/Bacall's four collaborations--is to glimpse something more than a
good casting eye: it's to witness the evolution of a true musical
genius. The rhythms are subterranean, the verses in-between the words;
to watch this and The Big Sleep (Hawks's other
collaboration with Bogie/Bacall) back-to-back is as close to rapture as
this experience gets.